Plotting the Music

First, let’s take a look at valence, which by Spotify’s definition is an attribute “that describes the musical positiveness conveyed by a track. Tracks with high valence sound more positive (happy, cheerful, euphoric), while tracks with low valence sound more negative (sad, depressed, angry).”

Before beginning the sentiment analysis it seems useful to look at what the songs mean using Spotify’s metrics to evaluate the emotions of a song, the following plots investigate how valence (x-axis) interacts with energy (y-axis), essentially producing a 4 quadrant graph where from quadrant 1-4 we have Anger, Happiness, Sadness, and Calmness. The colors on the labels in these graphs match the colors of the album covers just for fun, they don’t actually mean anything.

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Graphing is great but if you want to look at each song in more detail here is a table color coded by album.

Let’s check out all the songs organized by valence, once again color coded by album. The Life of Pablo, College Dropout, and Graduation all feature highest here.

Now a plot of valence, danceability, and energy as functions of album year, which for Kanye is just his album discography.

Sonic Score Table.

This table has the mean of all of Spotify’s metrics by album, which honestly seems to show a fairly consistent pattern for Kanye’s discography.

Sentiment Analysis

Wordcloud of the most frequent words in Kanye’s songs after filtering out common meaningless words like the, a, etc.

How many tracks does the word “kanye” appear in, and how often? Obviously a lot in “I Love Kanye”, but surprisingly enough only once in “Wake Up Mr. West”, and not even that much overall, I would not be surprised if most artists had similar amounts of self-references throughout their discography. Since he often refers to himself as ye, or yeezus, I also include those in the table count, but neither of those even show up that much, yeezus only appearing once in “Highlights” and “I am a God” each.

Wordcloud for just the album ye, you can see why sentiment analysis would pick this up as deeply depressed/angry/sad.

Wordcloud for 808s & Heartbreak, the issue is clear once again, although this time it could literally just because Kanye says “Amazing” A LOT in the song amazing, in fact he says it 55 times, which is the third most frequent by song out of all of his discography. Coming just after “bam” which isn’t sang by him in Famous, and “ey” also in Famous, it can really be argued that it is the largest personal use in his discography.

Wordcloud for My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, not much to interpret here there is a lot going on, but if you’ve heard this album this makes sense.

Lexical diversity is fairly consistently in the middle ranges, although there are some outliers in The Life of Pablo and The College Dropout that should be investigated.

Now for the real fun, sentiment analysis using NRC, AFINN, and BING, which is surprisingly straightforward.

Sentiment scores with AFINN, looks like its not a great tool in general given that it got the exact opposite of what it should have - that 808s was his most depressed and lowest point, it would be useful in the future to try to weight instrumental components in this analysis, to try to give context to the data.

Pyramid Plot of The Life of Pablo

Radar chart.

Most common words in song.